At this point everyone knows about Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo and his comments on Reddit supporting the socialist rifle club and calling Maine residents racist and dumb. Polling suggests that Democrats have decided they don’t care about any of that.
Today the Washington Post published a story about some awkward posts from another Democratic candidate. Bob Brooks is a Pennsylvania firefighter and union leader who is intended to help Dems flip a red congressional seat by appealing to the same sort of blue collar voters that Graham Platner appeals to in Maine.
But there’s a problem. Like Platner, Brooks had a habit of shooting his mouth off on social media. In Brooks case his platform of choice was Facebook. What’s interesting about this is that instead of a history of extreme, left-wing content, Brooks has a history of saying some pretty right-wing things.
Brooks’s posts, obtained by The Washington Post and previously publicized on a local blog, also include one calling former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick a “douchebag” during his protests around police brutality and another post that defended police in the wake of widespread protests following George Floyd’s killing in 2020.
Oops! That seems awkward. What else has he said?
On Aug. 3, 2019, Patrick Crusius entered an El Paso Walmart seeking to kill Latinos, killing 23 people and injuring 22 before pleading guilty to federal hate-crime charges.
A day later, Brooks posted a meme that read: “The problem is not guns. It’s hearts without God, homes without discipline, schools without prayer and courtrooms without justice.” The meme included an image of actor Clint Eastwood holding a rifle and a skull superimposed with the roman numeral III, an image often associated with the Three Percenters, a right-wing anti-government militia group…
The Walmart attack was a horrendous crime and Brooks doesn’t seem to be denying that. The problem is that he isn’t having the same knee-jerk response as most Democrats the day after a mass shooting and blaming guns. Luckily for Brooks, there are fellow Democrats eager to bail him out.
Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown and the first Latino to lead the Latino-majority city in the district Brooks hopes to represent, said while he would not have posted such a meme, it was a stretch to assume that when Brooks posted it, “he connected it in any way to the ethnicity or race of the people who were murdered at that Walmart.”
And as with Platner, the general consensus seems to be that Democrats won’t care about a few stray social media posts.
Some of Brooks’s high-profile supporters — including Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and the liberal Working Families Party — were aware of these Facebook posts before they backed him, according to multiple people familiar with the endorsements, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private vetting process.
Do Democrats deserve some credit for not going all cancel culture on Brooks and Platner? Maybe a little bit but of course they have a huge incentive to downplay the crazy in both races. Democrats still care more about power than wokeness. Flipping a Senate seat in Maine or a congressional seat in Pennsylvania is enough for them to all pretend they’re normal for a while.
But of course we all know how they feel about Democrats who actually hold views outside the lines drawn by the party. They hate them with a passion. Which explains how Sen. Fetterman of Pennsylvania is now underwater with Democrats.
“I’ve seen the polls, I get it,” he said of recent polling showing him underwater among Democrats in the state. Fetterman saw the criticisms accelerate following his support of Israel and the United States in their war against Iran.
“It is a third rail for a Democrat to even agree with anything that Republicans and especially President Donald Trump support,” he said. “It’s so bad that if Trump came out in support for ice cream and lazy Sundays, Democrats would f—ing hate it all.”…
Fetterman threw up his hands and laughed at rumors that he plans to switch parties to become a Republican.
“I would be the worst Republican. I would still continue to vote the way I always do,” he said, referring to the high number of times he votes with his party. He added for emphasis: “I am a Democrat.”…
Despite voting with Democrats the vast majority of the time, when Fetterman does not vote in lockstep with his party, a torrent of criticism from the left is unleashed not just on social media, but also from Democratic members of his delegation.
Democrats are willing to overlook anything to gain a seat but if Brooks said any of these things while in office, he’d become as popular as John Fetterman in two seconds flat. The Democratic Party remains a very narrow, angry party ready to punish anyone who fails to toe the line.
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